The Dance
by leaptad
Summary: A Charliecentric character study. Set a week or so after his mother's death


Author: Alison

Title: The Dance

Pairings: none

Summary: Character study of Charlie, set a week or two after the death of his mother

Rating: PG

Spoilers: none

Charlie descended the stairs slowly and deliberately. He had come down these steps many times in the past few months returning to his garage after showering, changing his clothes, perhaps even a few hours of sleep, but it felt like it was the first time in years. Today was his first day back at work since his mother's death. He walked into the kitchen and found it empty.

Some people thought that Charlie had no imagination, but nothing could be further from the truth. They believed he lived in a small world of numbers and equations, but those numbers were actually his key to exploring the universe.

There was no easy way to describe Charlie's genius. He often heard musicians or authors describe the process of artistic creation as taking that which was already present in their mind and transcribing it to a medium that existed beyond of confines of their intellect. The ancient Greeks had described it terms of muses. It was the same for Charlie. The equations already existed, trapped inside the things they described.

Charlie did not so much see the equations, but feel them in an organic, intrinsic way. It was like smelling a flower. One did not inhale the odor and then see the text "sweet" superimposed over the flower in their mind. What they actually smelled was far more complex that one word could describe. There were layers of smell, some felt in the nose, some in the mouth. But when you asked that person to write what they had sensed, they would write "sweet" because that was the word assigned by their language. How one experienced a situation was often very different from how they described it.

He could look at something as concrete as a pendulum swinging or as abstract as the forces that held an atom together, and intrinsically understand what the variables involved were and how they interacted with each other. When he wrote what he already understood, he wrote in mathematics because it was the language that described such things. It held no limitations like spoken languages did. One could add terms until the equation was perfect and without flaw.

He had gone through a romantic period, as sensitive boys often do, when he was about 15 or 16 years old. His period of wine and roses had, perhaps, been more intense and lonelier than that of others, simply because he had no peers. He taught classes full of students who were, at best, 4-5 years older than him and, at worst, almost double his age if they were returning to their education after an extended absence. And so he had become enamored of the concept of the muse: Kleio, Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Ourania, and Lakkiope became his girlfriends in the absence of flesh and bone. He had even added one: Abacus, the muse of mathematics. She had existed in his head, dressed in the flowing robes and garlands of flowers like her sisters, but inspiring those whose medium for creation was integers and sums. He had never breathed a word of her to any living soul, not even his ever-present mother.

But his mother was not here. He felt the cool stillness of the kitchen not occupied by her. Her absence was as tangible to him as her presence had always been.

He remembered one morning, years earlier, when he had come into this kitchen to find his parents dancing. His father swept his mother around the room, humming a song devoid of both melody and rhythm, his mother laughing. No, giggling. He could still remember the sound of her giggles, it was the joy of a twelve year old girl, not a woman well into her fifties. Charlie had watched them circle each other in intersecting elipses, and had felt the equation of the dance, expanding and growing as they moved. And now he called up that equation in his mind and watched as it drew arcs on the floor. Feet took shape describing the arcs, and legs attached to the feet. His parents' forms blossomed and grew from that equation, giggling and humming until his father finally dipped his mother and kissed her. Not a peck on the cheek or lips, but a deep and fulfilling kiss that any Hollywood studio would have proudly presented on its screens. And that was how he remembered his mother.

But now there was nothing. His father and his brother had a dance as well. He saw them as metallic spheres, magnetically charged, each with a North and South pole. When the two like poles met, they repelled, spinning away from each other, giving one another space to grieve and heal alone. But when the antipodal sides met, they came together with almost violent force. Crashing together into a warm embrace, or even just his father holding his brother's face in his big hands, their eyes meeting and understanding passing between them like static electricity. Charlie was his own sphere, but without those unseen rules of the attraction and repulsion of the bereaved to guide him, he felt like a dancer left in the middle of a lonely stage with no partner and no music.

He had sequestered himself during his mother's slow descent. Looking back, it had not been so slow. It had gone much too quickly. But at the time, the seconds had been agonizingly endless. And when they finally said that they were bringing her home from the hospital to wait for her to die, Charlie could bear no more. He had retreated into the waiting and willing arms of his beloved, his sweet, his Abacus. She held him entranced. Like a sailor following a will-o-the-wisp to his ultimate demise, Charlie had listened to her song poisoning his mind. One more algorithm. Just one more and then I will go see her. But he never had. And now she was gone. And Abacus was nothing more than an empty excuse rattling around in his brain.

His father came into the kitchen and touched Charlie's shoulder as he walked by. Charlie reached up and put his hand over his father's, willing it to stay. His father stopped and pulled his youngest son to him.

"Maybe I should just stay home," Charlie managed to croak, his windpipe as small as a soda straw.

"No," said his father, still crushing him in a bear hug. "No more hiding."

Charlie clutched meekly at the expanse of his father's back, clinging to him. Soon he would have to leave this kitchen, this house, this neighborhood and enter the world. Him and his pain and nothing to shield them from the cruelty of reality. But, for now, his father rocked him gently back and forth in his arms, and they found their own dance.


End file.
